[Reader-list] Myanmar's Rohingyas

[Bridget Kustin]

*http://www.economist.com/world/asia/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10214763*
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*Myanmar's Rohingyas*

*No place like home*
Nov 29th 2007 | SITTWE AND TAL CAMP
>From The Economist print edition

*Stateless and homeless, Myanmar's Muslims have been abandoned by everyone*

AS UNREST in Myanmar kindled flickering hopes of political change,
long-suffering refugees in Bangladesh were glued to their radios. They hope
for a chance to reclaim their land and their dignity. Sadly, they may be
waiting in vain. Not only are there scant signs of change from the
repressive ruling junta. But these are also Rohingyas, members of a poor
Muslim minority never very welcome at home.

The junta's persecution of Muslims has been extreme. But anti-Muslim
sentiments have been simmering for centuries in Burma. The dark-skinned
Rohingyas, who have more in common physically and culturally with
Bangladeshis than with most Burmese, have always suffered abuse.

The junta has ostracised them, by refusing full Myanmar citizenship, calling
them only "residents of Rakhine state". Almost all the roughly 800,000
Rohingyas today are stateless. The military regime routinely presses them
into slave labour, severely restricts their rights to travel and marry, and
denies them access to both medical care and education.

In Sittwe, the capital of Rakhine (formerly Arakan), Rohingyas lead
desperately poor lives. Those not pressganged into road construction at
meagre wages live by subsistence farming and fishing. "It's because we're
Muslim," declares a trishaw driver. He says people give work to Buddhists.
There are many poor Buddhists in Sittwe too. But the perception of unfair
treatment lingers amongst Muslims, though some made common cause with
September's anti-government protesters.

Rohingyas have been fleeing Myanmar for decades. Many mingle among the
million or so illegal Burmese migrants living in Thailand. And the office of
the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has documented
12,000 in Malaysia, but admits there may be twice that number. The largest
number has fled to Bangladesh. But the Bangladeshis have been reluctant
hosts. Citing overpopulation and land scarcity, successive governments have
forcibly repatriated the refugees: 250,000 were expelled between 1991 and
1992, and almost as many since.

Since 1992 Bangladesh has refused to grant the Rohingyas refugee status.
Only two official UNHCR camps now remain near Chittagong. But most of those
repatriated to the same dire conditions they had fled have trickled back to
squat in makeshift shelters and camps just across the border. Today around
8,000 live in an unofficial camp called Tal. Another 200,000 have settled in
the surrounding area.

Tal was born out of Operation Clean Heart, a 2002 crackdown in which
thousands of Rohingyas were rooted out of local villages. Frido Herinckx of
Médecins Sans Frontières, an aid organisation, describes how the police
threatened local Bangladeshis with prison unless they reported on their
Burmese neighbours. Instead of returning to Myanmar, thousands of homeless
Rohingyas regrouped and settled on a 30-metre-wide stretch of mud along the
banks of the Naf River.

In Tal as many as 12 people are crammed into flimsy shelters patched
together from reeds and plastic sheets. Floods regularly inundate the camp,
and local hostility to the incomers often leads to violence. Still, most
feel that life there is preferable to the daily humiliations suffered in
Myanmar. "If I can't even say 'this house is mine,' how can I live there?"
asks one 32-year-old man. He says the regime confiscated all he had.

The government in Bangladesh has recently shown signs of softening its
policies. It plans to move Tal to a drier and more permanent location. Aid
workers hope the Rohingyas will eventually be granted Bangladeshi
citizenship. Most Rohingyas say that if democracy is established in Myanmar,
they will go back. But the junta is not their only enemy.